Poetry

I will always remember Pythagoras because of you. An artist not a scholar, carpenter,  or for that matter a teacher at all— even in grade eight we understood you taught a2 + b2 = c2  for three straight months  because it was the only math you knew  and our regular teacher with his  re-heated coffees…

For a decade, I smoked a pack a day. It wasn’t the drug I craved but pure, gleaming abandon. At sixteen, I bent a car around a tree and loved the moment when I slipped headfirst from the webbed glass into a pool of streetlight, a puddle of my own blood. Sliding from the wreck…

Which weight did I know and which did I fail to carry? And what does one red cardinal weigh atop a wooden fence? In front of the yellow siding? The weight of. Please spare me what a man might own, what he might lift overhead, hoist once.   Before his bones grow hollow, his mind…

In the house made of guns in the city made of guns on the street lit with lead,   my father sits building a new room. This is to be my room, with a scope   for a window, the crosshairs of white wood across the glass   framing the yard with the hollowed-out pine…

It was despite, or because of the rain. It was because of the hot summer night, heavy and wet like roof insulation left out in unwrapped stacks at the cottage that never got finished. It was because it was too hot to breathe, and jumping in the lake was the only relief. It was because…

It opens in the light of day. A roofless Mustang, blue & winding electric along a cliff’s side. Through static, I hum This Will Be. We’re so close to lethal—an easy tip & it’s over. I’m finally learning to drive. At the DMV, you’ll shout the letters on the vision chart so I’ll remember from…

I’m thinking about the lives                                          that failed to choose me. Night’s vast ballroom, its stuttering chandelier. Fossilized beneath refrigerator magnets is a reverie of expired coupons, clipped from the pages of fate’s circular.                      You can’t live in the what-if but you can vacation there, can’t you? I hitch one end of my hammock…

After summer, I clear away the vulgar corpses from my flower beds: coarse vinca, shriveled marigold, and molding lupine drained of color by an infestation of aphids that sucked its sweet sap dry, I learned too late. My son, who spurned my breast as an infant, still refuses most food. He’s skinny, nothing like these…

My father smoked a pipe, loved to stare in the camera’s eye, make of it a twinkle or a wink, those were the days of gin and tonic, those were the days when he believed in the magic of his fertile brain—they called his body genius, the mastery over bat and ball, the lithe in…